It’s been a week since Arizona Republicans suffered the most bruising electoral loss in recent memory — and perhaps in the state party’s entire history — with Democrats trouncing them from the top of the ballot all the way down to local contests.
Much like their counterparts across the country, Republicans in the state are faced with a fork in the road:
Reckon with the results, make changes to their platform or strategy and come back strong in 2028
Learn nothing and keep chugging forward
At this point, it’s unclear which path they’ll take.
Minutes after being elected as the Legislature’s next minority leader on Friday during a Republican caucus meeting, outgoing Speaker Steve Montenegro was asked three times by Capitol scribe Howie Fischer whether there was a lesson to glean from his party’s colossal loss.
Steve Montenegro doing his first press conference as minority leader.
In each of his responses, Montenegro gave no indication that Republicans should switch anything up.
“We understand that the voters have made their decision. Our principles have not changed,” he said, while highlighting the party’s commitment to low taxes and parental rights.
That stance follows a pattern from other Arizona Republicans’ public statements about the election, which illuminate a general consensus that President Donald Trump was the main source of blame for the slaughter.
Sean Noble, a campaign strategist for Republican gubernatorial candidate Andy Biggs, told the Republic that doom came from above.
“This is the easiest autopsy that you can possibly write about a campaign. And that is, Donald Trump (expletive) us,” Noble said. “There is no safe place when you have a wave at a national level of this magnitude.”
From the sound of it, they seem to feel they have nothing to do with the loss.
“Like many of you, I am heartbroken for Arizona. I understand why voters are angry,” Republican secretary of state candidate Alex Kolodin tweeted on Wednesday. “I regret the harm that the message they sent to Washington will do to the state that I love.”
That strain of self-pity dominated Arizona Republicans’ election analysis.
“If you were one of those voters who thought it was right to punish ALL Republicans, regardless of their individual beliefs or records, just to send a message to Washington, D.C., you did it. Congratulations,” Republican Rep. Quang Nguyen, a Prescott Republican, wrote on Facebook.
Republicans seem to be pinning this one completely on Trump — who, interestingly, seems to be processing the huge loss and reconsidering his immigration and mass deportation agenda (even as he promoted its chief architect, Stephen Miller, to help lead the administration as chief of staff).
And Trump isn’t even going to be on the ballot next cycle.
But the fact is that over the course of an entire decade, Republicans have become the party of Trump and gone all in on the president’s cult of personality, rarely rebuking the president for fear of alienating his supporters.
Next time, they’ll be running without him. But can they actually get out from under his shadow?
Former Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda (who helped deliver Arizona for Trump in 2024) doubts the party can actually take heed of the voters’ voice and set itself on a viable trajectory back to being competitive.
We caught up with her for drinks two days after the election, where she said she saw the landslide and double-digit margins in most major races coming — a landslide that even she admits she couldn’t have changed.
Gina Swoboda and TJ cheers-ing to the election.
However, she said she “could have stopped the bleeding” and criticized current GOP Chair Sergio Arellano for allegedly mismanaging the party’s financial resources, focusing energy on courting Hispanic voters and not making a big enough media push.
“There was no one out there talking. Sergio wouldn’t even go on KTAR. Like, people have called me and said he won’t go. He would only go to little friendly places,” Swoboda said. “There was no attempt to moderate the tone. In my opinion, they weren’t coordinating — they were echoing (Trump).”
Swoboda mentioned several discussions she had with key party operatives who laughed when she stressed that the party can’t lose working-class voters, whom Trump won over before starting to lose their support in this election.
She also highlighted the main albatross hanging around the party’s neck: Turning Point, the far-right organization that’s become heavily involved in the party’s operations.
“Instead of it having a symbiotic relationship, like a little bird sitting on a hippopotamus, they won’t do that. They’re a fucking parasite,” she said. “The Republican Party is not conservative in the traditional sense now. They took the populism and they turned it into rage bait for power.”
Another GOP insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noted that the nonprofit’s strong influence over the party was one of several issues plaguing it.
The extinction-level event allowed candidates to gloss over a lot of existing problems in the Arizona Republican Party apparatus and simply blame Trump, rather than taking accountability and learning lessons, they said.
“It’s akin to letting the dog out and then getting mad at the dog for tearing up the couch,” they said. “Turning Point is the dog in this scenario.”
Still, they took solace in the fact that the beating was so life-threatening that saner heads now have an opportunity to rebuild the party from the ground up.
The source said that they had a meeting with a handful of other concerned Republicans before the election, and they all agreed on the diagnosis of the problem.
But they didn’t find a consensus solution — yet.
At the same time, it seems that some of the same Republican grifters who have lost several campaigns in a row — like Kari Lake — are still trying to remain relevant.
Is the party capable of changing course?
There’s plenty of time for it to happen. But the first step is admitting there’s a problem — and with GOP leaders shirking any responsibility for the massive loss, that hasn’t happened yet.
Oops: Gov. Katie Hobbs’ temporary moratorium on data center tax breaks, which she predicted would save the state $57 million a year, may have backfired by triggering a last-minute rush of applications before the pause took effect, the Republic’s Alaina Mencinger reports. The state approved 107 applications submitted in the weeks before the moratorium hit on July 1 — the previous record for approvals within a fiscal year was 11 in 2024.
MAHA’s detox: Arizona’s Make America Healthy Again organizers are hoping Democrats will embrace some of their policies after the movement failed to deliver as envisioned in the 2026 elections, Politico reports. Paula Obeid, an Arizona MAHA organizer, held an October rally for GOP gubernatorial candidate Andy Biggs at an alternative medical treatment facility, but Biggs ditched it for Donald Trump’s Bullhead City rally. The next day, Obeid and fellow activists headed to the state Capitol to lay the groundwork for 2027 legislation. But now that Democrats are in charge, Obeid announced the group is rebranding from the “Arizona MAHA Coalition” to the “Arizona Healthy Always Council.”
“MAHA is very political now,” Obeid said. “It’s polarizing.”
Judgment day: Three judges appointed by former GOP Gov. Doug Ducey are on track to lose their retention elections despite meeting judicial performance standards, the Republic’s Perry Vandell reports. Progressive groups criticized Arizona Court of Appeals Judge Anni Hill Foster for her ties to right-wing legal groups and Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Julie Mata for allowing the anti-DEI Prop 142 to stay on the ballot. But there’s no obvious political controversy surrounding fellow Superior Court Judge Michael Rassas, though he received some poor judicial temperament reviews.
Stay tuned: Hobbs and Lt. Gov.-elect John Giles went on AZFamily’s “Good Morning Arizona” to offer a few hints, but no specifics, on their plans for the next four years. Hobbs expects “a lot of momentum” on school voucher reform, wants to finally get Prop 123 — the expired school funding measure — in front of voters and reminded viewers that she “stood up to the Biden administration” on border security. And Giles said the details of what his role will actually entail will be announced “in the next few weeks.”
The defense rests: After Arizona voters enshrined a constitutional right to abortion in 2024, the incoming Democratic legislative majority plans to drop Republicans’ remaining legal defense of abortion restrictions still on the books, Kiera Riley reports for Capitol Media Services. Republican legislative leaders have continued defending laws including bans on telemedicine prescriptions for abortion pills and abortions based on sex, race or genetic abnormalities. While dropping the defense won’t automatically erase those laws, it clears the way to resolve the court case.
The exception: Despite Democrats’ sweeping midterm victories, Arizona joined three other states in strengthening restrictions on transgender athletes, per the Washington Post. Arizonans approved Prop 318, which expands restrictions on transgender students in school sports and locker rooms, while voters in Democratic-controlled Colorado and Washington approved similar bans. A UCLA sociologist said the results show “how wrong the narrative has been on the left as well as on the right.”
Senate Republicans met yesterday to pick their first minority caucus leadership team in decades: John Kavanagh as the minority leader, Tim Dunn as assistant minority leader and Leo Biasiucci as minority whip.
But the truly hilarious part is that they gave election denier and all-around weirdo Mark Finchem a job as “deputy assistant minority leader of communications.”
We’ll just skip over all the obvious “deputy assistant to the regional manager” jokes and go straight into a deep cut from 2020, when Finchem ran for House speaker on a platform of bad ideas — including giving lawmakers a $275,000 slush fund each.
In his seven-page manifesto about what a Finchem speakership would look like, he actually proposed a version of the job that he’ll hold going forward — a new “majority messenger” leadership position.
But the cherry on top of that bizarre rant was his pledge to use “mimes” to improve the caucus communications.
No, it wasn’t a typo. It was repeated throughout.1
“The regular use of mime’s (sic) to build brand identity and establish solid differentiation will serve us well,” Finchem wrote in the document, presumably meaning memes.
1 In fact, the word mimes included two typos since he spelled it “mime’s” — the possessive of a mime — on every single reference.